Fateful Frolic in an Eden Gone Awry

In the twilight of a winter’s Saturday, Wilmer Chicas drowned in the lake at MacArthur Park.

He had been caught up in one of those soccer games that starts up whenever there’s a ball and a patch of grass and at least a couple of people who love the game. The ball had rolled into the lake, and Wilmer Chicas--a young man who couldn’t swim, who was carrying a lot of pounds on his frame--went in after it, his black and white running shoes following the black and white ball into the water.

The lake can fool you. At its fringes, it is as shallow as a kiddie pool, but it drops away to five or six feet, and then bottoms out to 12 or 15 feet.

The park can fool you, too. In daylight, when soccer fans like Wilmer Chicas and families and chess fiends and picnickers fill the place up, it can look like a real park. At night, it’s another place, the business address of junkies and crack dealers, hookers and cutpurses.

What struck me about Wilmer Chicas’ death was that it was the first time in a long time that I’d heard of someone dying in MacArthur Park in a fashion that had anything to do with the business of a park--fishing, jogging, playing soccer.

Oh, people do die here, no question of that. They get shot or stabbed. They overdose.

The pity of Wilmer Chicas’ death is countered by its symbolism. To drown in MacArthur Park--like it was a real park, pastoral and not perilous--may be a sign; is it making a comeback?

*

L.A. made picture postcards of this park once, bragged on it and brought the tourists here to marvel and gawk.

Even now, it isn’t hard to believe that. Step out of the immaculate Metro Rail station, and the vista is something lovely to behold, both oasis and mirage--shaggy-shouldered palms and the spray from the fountain coruscating into a looking-glass lake.

But the mirage shimmers into focus, and there, below the palms, are the gangbangers’ spray-painted nonsense words, the day shift dope sellers, and the dark-wrapped bundles that are the homeless, huddled on benches or out on the sidewalks pulling at overburdened shopping carts like they were balky pack mules.

Once, this was the Central Park of L.A., fringed as New York’s is by elegant apartment buildings whose rooftop names are written in neon against the sky--Royale Wilshire, Hotel Barbizon.

No one can precisely reconstruct the chain reaction that changed that. The moneyed class moved west, the middle class found the suburbs more to their liking, and by the 1970s, the rents put the aging apartments within reach of immigrant newcomers. And they in turn were ripe for the fleecing by muggers and con men and sellers of fake green cards. The drugs came in big-time in the ‘80s; by 1990 the cops’ census counted a thousand crack heads and whores as the park’s floating population.

Businesses moved, businesses closed, and politicians used them as photo-op backdrops to deplore crime for the cameras of the 6 o’clock news.

The 110-year-old park was sinking like a great ocean liner, rising up for a time after new cleanups and crime sweeps and arts programs, then sinking back into the waves, rising when another restoration took hold, and falling back again. And the families and soccer players and chess fiends who took their fearful leisure in the park were hopeful and disappointed by turns.

Other parts of town have dog parks and jogging parks and parks with tennis courts. For just taking it easy, though, I know no one among my acquaintances who takes the family to the park. That’s what back yards are for; that’s why the California bungalow was the antithesis, architectural and social, of the vertical cities of the East. Visitors who ask to visit our “slums” are uniformly astonished to see little stucco houses painted in gumdrop colors, each set upon a patch of lawn. But for the poor of the apartment-dwelling, urban L.A., the parks are the back yards.

*

The park rules are posted at the entrances. “No open fires.” And yet trash can fires are smoking in the morning mist. The city had to remove the barbecue pits because the homeless were killing and grilling the park ducks. “Dog defecation must be removed immediately”--and yet the flowers can smell of human feces, and crack accessories turn up in the foliage.

Eddie Comick, rake in hand, is pulling up both weeds and memories, of band shell concerts and paddle boat rides here. He does day labor in exchange for his general relief check; “better than sitting around like them,” and he nods toward the cocooned homeless whose slovenliness now annoys him so that he sounds like a TV spot for a substandard cleaning product: “You can have it looking good, but about 30 minutes after, it looks like we haven’t done any work at all.”

About 15 years ago, a homeless man went into MacArthur Park lake to fish out a kid’s tricycle, after the kid’s mother offered him $3 to retrieve it. He drowned. Now, Wilmer Chicas, chasing after a soccer ball. People I can understand; how is it that a park can slip underwater and perish?